Email marketing is one of the most important components of any businesses marketing strategy. It does not matter if you are a major corporation or a small locally owned business. Successful email marketing can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Businesses of all sizes spend significant resources on acquiring email addresses, managing them in CRM’s, and putting together image based email marketing flyers. While a creative image based email can be visually appealing, is it the best way to get your message to your distribution list? The answer is typically no. Image based emails face a laundry list of problems including:

• Commonly triggering SPAM filters
• Ending up in the promotions tab of Gmail
• Requiring recipients to click “download pictures”
• Longer download times/slower to open
• Display and resolution issues

Open rates for email marketing campaigns are crucially important because it is the first step in converting email contacts into customers. It does not matter how strong our campaign messaging is if our emails are winding up in SPAM folders, not properly displaying in inboxes, or winding up in Gmail’s promotions tab. A 5% increase in open rate, on a weekly distribution to 5,000 recipients, translates to 13,000 more customers or prospects seeing our marketing pieces over the course of a year. If an organization historically converts 0.5% of opens into customers, this could mean up to an additional 65 customers a year, just by using a text based approach. For your next email marketing campaign, consider using a text based approach in HTML and removing or greatly reducing the number of images included. If you have previously been using image based flyers, this could have a significant impact on your open rates. For more information on how AltaVista can help your business with email marketing or your general marketing strategy, please fill out the form on this page, email us at [email protected] or call us at 410-7760-6680.